Material Agency

• Material agency is an existing condition of relational reality and intra-active matter, the processes of co-becoming phenomena.

• Every day matters become an aesthetic encounter through ordinary surfaces, atmosphere, and relational perception.

• Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism and Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter, we highlight how materials possess their own liveliness and affective capacities. Baruch Spinoza’s concept of conatus, the inherent striving of all beings to persist and flourish, understands materials as active participants, or living companions, within shared processes of creation and becoming (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Spinoza, 1677/1996). 

• Matter is not inert or secondary to human intention; rather, it is dynamic, responsive, and always already in relation. Therefore, art and art materials are not passive tools but active participants in the unfolding of experiences.

  • Materials resist, invite, extend, and transform what becomes possible. 

  • What emerges is not a product solely determined by human direction, but a co-constituted process shaped through ongoing intra-action among visible and invisible human and more-than-human matters.

• As teaching and learning are processes entangled with more-than-human others (Barad, 2007), children’s engagements with materials become moments in which meaning, action, and response unfold together, revealing that creative practice is never fully controlled but always contingent, relational, evolving, and open to becoming.​

 

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

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Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press​

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Spinoza, B. (1994). A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and other works (E. Curley, Trans. & Ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1677)